Three-way Ticket

‘Three-way Ticket’, features two international artists in conjunction with a San Francisco based artist. Three Way Ticket defines contemporary figurative painting into three categories: figurative painting with traditional oil painting influence, presented by Liz Schmidt, figurative painting with illustrative influence presented by Søren Behncke, and figurative painting with art brut influence presented by Michael Swaney. These three contemporary accounts, define figurative painting today.

On display in the gallery through July 31, 2017.
(*image by Søren Behncke)

Currently living and working in Vancouver, B.C., Mark DeLong produces works in a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, drawing, and video. DeLong has exhibited in 11 countries and is a prolific explorer of unconventional mediums and materials. In his current body of work, he’s assembled intricate folk art looking collage tapestries using simple cotton thread and recycled produce boxes. & Pens Press has compiled a large selection of these works in it’s latest publication entitled Stars Above, Snakes Below. Gallery exhibition will feature works from the book.

DeLong will be in attendance for the opening reception.
On display through May 27, 2017.

Opening Reception September 10th, 2016 from 6:30-8:30PM
On Display through October 2, 2016

About Rad Women Worldwide:From the authors of the New York Times bestselling book Rad American Women A-Z, comes a bold new collection of 40 biographical profiles, each accompanied by a striking illustrated portrait, showcasing extraordinary women from around the world.

In Rad Women Worldwide, writer Kate Schatz and artist Miriam Klein Stahl tell fresh, engaging, and inspiring tales of perseverance and radical success by pairing well researched and riveting biographies with powerful and expressive cut-paper portraits. Featuring an array of diverse figures from Hatshepsut (the great female king who ruled Egypt peacefully for two decades) and Malala Yousafzi (the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize) to Poly Styrene (legendary teenage punk and lead singer of X-Ray Spex) and Liv Arnesen and Ann Bancroft (polar explorers and the first women to cross Antarctica), this progressive and visually arresting book is a compelling addition to women’s history.

Praise:“Imagine learning history right the first time, without ever having to unlearn all the lies and omissions. RAD WOMEN WORLDWIDE lifts the doom—maybe this is, in fact, a wonderful time to grow up.”
—Miranda July, artist, writer, and filmmaker

“This book needs to be in every school, library, and home.”
—Margaret Cho, comedian

Energy Descriptions is an exhibiiton of paintings in gouache on paper stained with tea or india ink. Thematically they vary from botanicals to abstract shapes. The botanicals are efforts toward describing generative power and unitive life force almost realistic with something spontaneous and unplanned appearing within each. Alternatively, the abstract pieces represent meditations in which Bright selected a subject, allowing each movement of the brush to draw her deeper inside of it.

Bio:
Julianna Bright was born in Los Angeles in 1971. She grew up in Southern California and received a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley in 1995.

Julianna’s vivid, delicate works in gouache, watercolor and ink have appeared on album covers, in periodicals and in galleries around North America. Her band – Golden Bears – with her husband Seth Lorinczi, was 2012 alternative pick on iTunes & Amazon. Julianna also makes award-winning children’s music under the name Cat Doorman.

Open Reception: Saturday July 9, 2016 from 6:00-9:30 p.m.(runs through 8/2/16)

Both Bonifacio and Sieben live and work in Austin, TX, creating murals, illustrations, paintings, skateboard graphics, and sculptures. Briar’s drawing style is reminiscent of 1950’s American advertising with household items, animals and food all coming to life: wasabi characters, sushi-roll men, bluebirds, Buddhist bandit cats, Egyptian ladybugs and Gaudí-like birdhouses all have a story to tell you in his paintings. Bonifacio has been painting murals for the past 23 years and has exhibited from Hong Kong to New York. He has worked with Deitch Projects, bringing his characters to life for art parades and has also created a forest of smiling trees with Pope Park in Hartford, CT.

Michael Sieben is best known for his cast of invented characters, whose portraits mirror our own trials and tribulations of modern-day existence, their weariness and wounds worn proudly as opposed to being hidden. Sieben is currently the managing editor of Thrasher magazine and has a monthly column in Juxtapoz magazine. In addition, he co-owns a small skateboard brand called The Program and is an active member of the Okay Mountain art collective, founded in Austin, TX, in 2006.

Opening Saturday May 7, 2016 from 6-9pmFridge!
a solo show byDave King
Fridge! A strange new installation by Dave King, designer of the Crass Symbol. Carrying a packed lunch and a flask of tea, Dave King wanders off into the bushes in search of an un-marked path. Through dense undergrowth seeded with shards of rusty metal, along canals and past World War Two bunkers, the road spirals towards the infinite. A few inexplicable signposts are visible in the show, photographic ghosts, consumer durables, a smiling Crass symbol and radiant aliens. Out of the fridge and into the trees. No Way. Way!
On display through May 30th

Artist Statement:
For the last 5 or so years the work I have been making has been smallish wooden sculptures. The wood I use is almost always found or reused/recycled or whatever term is most en vogue to describe art material not bought for that purpose. There is a practicality to working like this but it is also often an aesthetic choice as well, wood or other material that is old or used is generally more visually appealing to me and often gives me a starting point to begin a new work. The act of making something is the way I have found to be the most useful and satisfied to myself at the end of the day. It is probably as simple as that, a way to keep myself busy and feel like I’m being productive in some way. I begin with small bits of wood, painted or not. Then it is a matter of playing with them until I can see some way they will start to fit together. It’s sort of like a puzzle with no picture to use as a reference. Visual and structural problems often quickly arise and it is then that a piece will begin to develop. I suppose I almost seek out the problems in order to continue making them, it all becomes a way to stay interested and motivated to work. I describe the process of making here in this statement because that is much of what the work is about. It is process based work and it took me a long time to come to terms with that (I’m probably still coming to terms). It is the act of making that satisfies and frustrates me. It is dealing with my own personal emotions and feelings while making that I suppose the work is about. Maybe this is why I titled the show “ok”, because ok for me describes a strange ambivalent satisfaction. The way life is, up and down but hopefully (for me) ok. If I can work the way I want to and feel good about myself at the end of the day then I think that is probably a worthwhile endeavor.
– Damien Hoar de Galvan

Joe Roberts has worked as an artist in San Francisco for the last decade. His mixed media work has been released in various formats over the years and shown nationwide to great acclaim. Joe creates artwork which represents a variety of mixed media formats and is reminiscent of work from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joseph Cornell. Collage, paintings, diorama and figurines all play a role in the world he has created and is constantly reinterpreting. This book represents a year-long curated survey of his career thus far in the form of 142 full color reproductions of his work. – Unpiano Books

“Joe Roberts’ journey to the unknown is dotted with the protective guardians of childhood nostalgia. These come in the flavors of films, comics, candies, logos, and branding of the 80s and early 90s, not to mention latent countercultural references from 60-70s. This is the bulk of the content in his works and it is these references that place him in his time period and in a group of people bent on breaking through the illusions and finding themselves.” – Matthew Ronay, 2014

Dave King‘s Odd Alcove
A Solo Show and book release forThe Secret Origins of the Crass Symbol

“Dave King was born in London not long after the Second World War, when there was still food and clothing rationing and children played in mysterious and hazardous bomb sites, between rows of bland and un- damaged terraced or semi-detached houses. It was a grey world which didn’t see much colour until the economy finally improved in the Sixties, which were nothing if not colourful. To avoid a job as a bank clerk, King went to Art School (where he met Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher, later of Crass.) For the next ten years he worked as a graphic designer and art director before “retiring” to the communal house that eventually became home to the band. He then moved to New York and fell happily into the Downtown music scene of the late Seventies, joining the band Arsenal. He did illustrations for the Museum of Modern Art and the logo for downtown club Danceteria as well as graphics for many bands. His band then moved to San Francisco in the early Eighties (a very interesting time in the California punk scene), becoming Sleeping Dogs, which appeared (as did Arsenal) on Crass Records. Today Dave King still lives in San Francisco, still designs logos and works on his own graphic, photographic and film projects.” – Boing Boing

Tahiti Pehrson creates large-scale, meticulously hand cut, three-dimensional paper sculptures. His intricate x-acto knife carvings explore the fragility and connectedness of the world. The detailed installations offer viewers a glimpse at how microscopic life might appear on a giant scale. Much like a magnified snowflake, Pehrson’s works reveal the magnificently beautiful patterns not always obvious to the naked eye, but quite inherent within nature.

Needles & Pens presents,ASK THE DUST
A two person exhibition of ink drawings
by Joey Alone and Deuce 7

Escaping the monotony, greed and meaningless vanity of city life for something which is tangible and raw and fills the void, Joey Alone and Deuce 7 have put ink to paper and attempted to share with the world what they both have actively chosen to seek out over the past two years – abandoned railroad infratsructure, beaten wood shacks, chaparral cliffs and the emptiness and desolation of the California Deserts. With a focus both on the non-human Natural World, as well the abandoned and forgotten aspects of the Human World, their work is born out of a world focused on both the granite rock and rusted iron of the American West. Joey Alone is a brakeman with the Railroad, Deuce 7 is a railroad enthusiast and vagabond.

Jesse Balmer, Niv Bavarsky and Michael Olivo started drawing together early in 2012. The drawing sessions, which were initially for amusement, became herapeutic and mind expanding for all three artists. Each learning their distinct roles in two or three way collaborations helped solidify each artist’s personal voice in a way unique to the collaborative process. Many drawings were completed, and surprisingly, few ended as failures. This show is an opportunity to see very nearly all the drawings, in a variety of mediums, that the three completed together after a year of collaboration.

Golden Source Power Three will be on display February 8 through March 3, 2013

XARA THUSTRA Book Release and Art Show – Friendship Between Artists is an Equation of Love and Survival
December 6, 2012-February 3, 2013,

The story of the “Mission School” is not complete without XARA THUSTRA. Both an activist and artist, Thustra has been pushing the envelope socially and artistically for 15 plus years in San Francisco. Xara’s ever evolving creative medium has been graffiti, screen printed posters. calendars, murals, paintings, video, music, performance and protest. Socially, Xara has been responsible for anti-war actions, gay activism, feeding the hungry, anti-capitalist actions, squats like 949 Market, and so much more…

This beautiful 500 page book captures 15 plus years of Thustra’s work in one package through photos and imagery. Not to mention, there are also cameos contained within from Xylor Jane, Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, Emory Douglas, Erick Lyle, Kyle Ranson, Ivy Jean, Sy Loady, and a cast of other SF punks, artists, queers, and activists. Such fantastic stuff. Don’t miss this.

“Thustra’s art fills me with a crazy unhinged joy. It makes you want to do something joyful and spectacular and very illegal. I would like to think that my heart looks something like this, and yours too.” – Michelle Tea

“I have always been inspired by the creativity of Xara. It is always 100 percent care. One of my favorite artists that I met in SF. Making things to make people think and with so much concern. This book about creative ritual and meditation toward making things better is a good gesture in the Left direction. A non text book, but in the school of life.” – Chris Johanson

“Like an invisible giant, silently stalking our city, converting it’s ever-more-boring facade into an impassioned, beautiful call to arms, revolution, and to love. Xara has created an incredible genre and gender busting body of work. This is the freak flag flying high.” – Bill Daniel

Loud Nights at Home
a four person art exhibition featuring the works of:Mike Taylor, Arwen Curry, Colin Lapuyade, and Sara Sandberg
with music by: Nasty Xmas and Pins of Light June 1, 2012 – July 31, 2012
<align=”right”>Diptych, 2012 by Mike Taylor

About

Needles & Pens is an emporium of zines, art books, accessories, and an art gallery. Located in San Francisco's Mission District since 2003, the space aims to provide an affordable place where like minded people from the community can display and sell their own home-made goods, home-published zines, and art work.

If you're interested in selling your work at N&P email us at needlesandpens@hotmail.com and/or submit a nonreturnable sample by mail to the address below.